• Indigenous Policy and Silence at Confederation

    This essay is the first in a three-part series on Confederation that provides critical historical context for Canada’s sesquicentennial anniversary. The other essays will appear on the 28th and 30th of June. Brian Gettler Infamously, the British North America Act only mentions, “Indians and lands reserved for the Indians” in a single sub-clause, assigning responsibility… Continue Reading

  • How to Finish Your Thesis

    Jerry Bannister Writing is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, delusional, or one of those utterly bizarre people who find it easy. June in Canada brings dandelions, complaints about the weather, and, for those of us in universities, thoughts of writing. This is that magical time when the dust of the academic year… Continue Reading

  • Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World: A Review

    Ann Little Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Critical Perspectives on Empire series. If you’re on Twitter this summer of 2017, perhaps your timeline is like mine: full of #Canada150 (insert Maple Leaf emoji here) mentions this summer, both filiopietistic from the settler colonial perspective… Continue Reading

  • The American Gaze: Adam Gopnik’s Canada

    Jerry Bannister Adam Gopnik’s recent article, “We could all have been Canadians,” published in the May 15th issue of the New Yorker, has attracted considerable attention on social media among Canadian historians.[1] I’ve already chimed in with a short comment on Christopher Moore’s blog.[2]   With the sun shining hopefully on my back deck this morning,… Continue Reading

  • Preview: Early Canada at the CHA

    The annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association will take place next week from May 28th to 31st at Ryerson University in Toronto as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Drawn from the preliminary program (which includes information on room locations) available on the CHA’s website, the following is a preview… Continue Reading

  • Remembering Michael Bliss

    Elsbeth Heaman In recent years I’ve sometimes had the feeling that I’m stalking Michael Bliss. Time and again I’ve wandered into a particular historical thicket, and found that he had been there ahead of me. It wasn’t purposeful, but my work continually took me there. Shirley Tillotson invited me in on a collaborative project on… Continue Reading

  • Refugees Fit for Rescue: Loyalists, Maroons, and Mi’kmaq

    Ruma Chopra How does Canada’s more open, even welcoming policy towards Syrian refugees fit with other refugees, black loyalists and Maroons who entered the Maritimes over 200 years ago when the colonies were peripheral regions within a larger British Empire? Part of the difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time is sheer… Continue Reading